What are good InstallAnywhere replacements for installing a Java EE application?

Deployment in an multi-platform environment is always a big source of troubles. It think that the optimum solution would target the creation of native packages for all platforms, like RPM, DEB or MSI ... the ones that could be installed unattended also.

Developers should work on making the application self-healing and run without installation.

Doing so will payoff in minimize the deployment efforts.

I know this is not quite a solution as you where asking but sometimes you may get better results this way.

Remember that you'll get free updating service on Linux if you follow these.

I still hope Microsoft will add something similar to MSI (and that would not require you to register at them). Meanwhile for Windows you can take a look at Google Updater just released as open source - http://code.google.com/p/omaha/

They released a similar product for Mac OS http://code.google.com/p/update-engine/ but sad that they didn't think about creating one product from these two.

I recommend having a look at cmInstall, which can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/cminstall/

It meets almost all your requirements and it's open source. Plus I'm one its developers :).

1. [yes] Must support running custom Java code as part of installation procedure
2. [yes] Must support Windows, including latest 64-bit versions like Windows Server 2008; support for other target operating systems is a plus
3. [can be easily done by using 3rd party libs- e.g.:Tanuki Software] Must be able to install a bundled application server (such as Resin or Tomcat) as a service on Windows
4. [yes]Must support basic stuff like copying and moving files around, editing configuration files, extracting ZIPs, etc.

5. [yes - or you can programatically download & unzip it ]Must support bundling a specific version of JRE; at the very least by including a ZIP to be extracted

   6.[no - it needs jdk 1.6 installed, support for .exe or .msi is planned for future]Preferably does not depend on a preinstalled JRE (or any other 3rd party runtime environment or library) on target machine; in other words, can produce an independent Windows .exe (or .msi)

6. [yes] The tool should preferably be cross-platform so that installer development can be done on Linux, Windows, or Mac.

   7.[no - the cminstall framework is "developer based" - but easy to use.Just read the tutorials from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=250019&package_id=305489 and see how easy it is to build an installer!] Should preferably have a decent GUI for putting the installer together. Once that is done, however, it must be possible to skip the GUI and make installer building part of automated build proc